Video traffic smoothing and ATM multiplexer performance

The authors report on the performance of a (single-node) multiplexer for transporting variable bit rate video services over ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) networks. Two different cases of cell distribution over a frame period have been considered: random arrival with uniform distribution and burst arrival. It is shown that the network utilization is maximized when sources are uncorrelated and their cells are uniformly distributed, the buffer occupancy gravitates toward either the empty side or the full side. When the distribution of cells is smoothed on a per frame basis, the frame synchronization across sequences has little impact on the cell-loss characteristics; however, when the cells are transmitted in a burst at frame intervals, a strong dependence on the frame synchronization is found. It is concluded that to improve performance, the cell transmission from each source should be smoothed at least over a frame period